Attendance vs. Engagement: Are We Setting Kids Up to Hate Learning? (Pt. 1)

You know what I find fascinating about student aspirations? The paradoxical nature of it all. There’s this undeniable inverse relationship between the policies and interventions meant to raise aspirations and the actual outcomes they produce. Year in, year out, new policies roll in, all designed to "raise aspirations", but here’s the first problem: aspirations are often measured through attendance. That means the entire system leans toward quantitative measures rather than qualitative ones, making it easy to miss the bigger picture.

Let me break it down. If we define aspirations by attendance rates - a neat, measurable metric, like Jean-François Lyotard talks about in terms of performativity, then all the efforts go into boosting attendance rather than truly nurturing ambition. Lyotard argued that in modern education, success is often reduced to measurable outputs rather than genuine learning or growth. So, when aspirations get tangled up in numbers, the focus shifts from what students actually want to achieve to whether they physically show up, which, as we know, are two very different things. Attendance vs. Engagement.

Take some schools, for example, that are pushing rewards for attendance to ridiculous levels. I’m talking Apple Airpods! Yes, you read that right. Students can literally earn an Apple Airpods just for showing up. And if that’s not motivation enough, there’s always the looming threat of fines for parents. (I need a whole separate blog post to rant about the redundancy of that policy!) But here’s the catch: attendance-driven incentives don’t shift aspirations. If a student is showing up only to win Airpods or because their parent fears a fine, then their actual aspirations remain unchanged. They’re still where we left them: uninspired, unmotivated, and disengaged.

But let’s be honest, we live in an incredibly performative world, which means performativity itself rolls downhill. Schools need to hit their attendance targets, so they do whatever it takes, treat or threat. (Except, spoiler alert: it doesn’t actually work, which makes it all the more tragic.) But hey, the local council is pleased, and what do you know? The Secretary of Education gets to stand at a podium and announce that they’ve "boosted academic aspirations" because student absences have dropped by a whopping 0.0005%! Yay!

Because here’s the thing - they’re all being measured by numbers too. The cycle continues, and aspirations? They’re nowhere to be found.

But who’s the real victim here? The students.

We hear so much about adults needing to find joy in their work because we spend so many hours of our lives doing it. But what about students? They spend just as much time (if not more) in school, yet no one seems to ask:

Do they actually enjoy it? Do they feel inspired? Do they even want to be there?

And more importantly, don’t they deserve to? Do they not deserve to enjoy the place where they spend the majority of their childhood and teenage years? Instead of focusing on making learning meaningful, we’re handing out rewards and punishments, hoping that somehow, along the way, real aspirations will magically appear.

And here’s the reality:

Waking up every morning to go to a place you don’t want to be, but have to, because of either an Airpod or a fine is no different from waking up every morning with a pit in your stomach, dragging yourself to a job you dread, but have to, because of a Pay Cheque at the end of the month or the looming threat of a disciplinary. And yet, we call this raising aspirations.

If we have to rely on treats or threats to get students into school, then maybe attendance data shouldn’t be used as a measure of aspiration.

The truth is that many students don’t enjoy school, and unless we fix that, we’re failing them and damaging their mental health. It’s time to move beyond numbers and take a holistic approach.

First and foremost, let’s make sure they’re okay.

Instead of chasing attendance targets, let’s actually meet students' needs. That’s what a holistic approach looks like - ensuring they are mentally ready to learn.

And here’s the hard truth: that takes real work. More than just shuffling truant students into a pastoral room every lesson. Because a ‘quick chat’ before sending them back to class isn’t support. It’s performative. A box-ticking exercise.

Let’s not do that. Let’s actually show up for them.

To be continued…